An Interview with Valerie A. Smith, Author of Back to Alabama

Ahead of the release of her full-length poetry collection Back to Alabama, Sundress intern Whitney Cooper spoke with Valerie A. Smith on spirtuality, Black lineages, and returning to the South.

Whitney Cooper: How does Back to Alabama’s compilation inform its thematic movements?

Valerie A. Smith: When I began compiling Back to Alabama several years ago, the original manuscript contained more than eighty pages in various recognizable sections: Black history, family history, spirituality, and closeness to nature. Because these represent facets of who I am as a human being, it was challenging to separate the poems into distinct sections. After a 2020 virtual visit by Jericho Brown to our poetry workshop at GSU, I began to thread the endings of one poem with the beginnings or themes of the next. Much later, after teaching Jesse Graves’ Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, I pared the manuscript down to poems that I am most confident about. This made the poems much easier to distinguish. In the first section, I introduce myself through family history and situate myself in the Black experience. I end the first section with Alice Walker in Eatonton, Georgia and move to the second section with “The Sugar Shack” and other iconic representations of Black culture. This section ends with Chadwick Boseman’s death, which invokes the precious lives of Black men in America. Therefore, I could see the next section beginning with Anthony Hill, an Air Force veteran with mental health issues killed by a police officer. This contemplation only moves us into the spiritual journey, and finally seeking to be grounded in the nature that surrounds us.

WC: In “Holy City: Charleston, SC”, the speaker balances ideas such as “battling malaria” with “the massus and the missus.” How do lines like this thread this collection together with—or drive them apart from—the ideas of the Back to Africa movement?

VAS: “Holy City” was a tough poem for me to write. After having visited the city many times, learning something new about Black history each time, I began to feel conflicted. Making Charleston the speaker was the most impactful way for me to reconcile vacationing in the largest slave port of North America. Like many African Americans, I may never actually step foot on African soil. But knowing that Africa is in the very soil of places like Charleston is a very small consolation.

WC: How does religious faith and spirituality, especially Southern Christian faith, shape the more secular corners of the collection?

VAS: I often say that God gave me Jesus then poetry because I need them both. As a practicing Christian, one whose faith was born and raised in Catholic school and the American Baptist churches of New Jersey, I had a deep personal spirituality before I moved to the South. Just as my faith has strengthened and matured here in Atlanta, so too has my love for music, movies, nature, and the pursuit of justice.

WC: How do the lives of Harriet Tubman, Giancarlo Esposito, Whitney Houston, and other figures influence your formal choices in the poems about them?

VAS: I do have an affinity for tercets and quatrains. The three-line stanza is a very tight argument in a much smaller room. The stanza reads fast, but the white space slows it down. That is how I feel about the Harriet Tubman and Giancarlo Esposito poems. I wrote “Harriet Tubman” for my sister, a caseworker in the juvenile justice system and drew similarities in their vocations. Tercets work for “Giancarlo” as scenes in honor of his prolific acting career. For Whitney, I needed alternate left- and right-justified lines to show a conversation because it seems she was never able to be herself, by herself. I wanted the staggered stanzas of “Miles Davis” to show a fractured incantation and conversation between the trumpeter, his wives, and his instrument.

WC: The poems in Back to Alabama have a strong sense of physicality yet are at the same time imbued with images commonly associated with death: can you speak more to this juxtaposition?

VAS: I will invoke the title poem here. I began writing “Back to Alabama” to illustrate my family’s participation in the movement of African Americans from the South to the North during the 1930s-1950s, and the next generation’s subsequent return. In the midst of writing this poem, my nephew died here in the South, and I wrote the final lines, “here we go back to Alabama.” The Black body, even the one in which my spirit and soul live, is endangered in this country. “The Sugar Shack” speaks to our beauty while “Legion” and “Queen & Slim” speak to our peril. Even our pursuit of God has a physical component illustrated in “The Other Nine” and “Exodus.”

WC: Celebrities and historical figures, especially Black women, often feel as or even more familiar to the speaker than even the speaker’s loved ones. What drives this sense of familiarity?

VAS: That is an interesting question because I was forty years old before I truly recognized that my grandmother’s name was Curlie Blue. The history of Black people in America is fraught with family separation, misinformation, and secrecy. There is so much that I still don’t know about my own family. But when Alice Walker celebrated her 75^th birthday, it was like seeing an ancestor. And when I remember that Whitney Houston is from my home state, that her rendition of “The National Anthem” was played before my basketball games, and that I prayed desperately for her health and the return of her voice, that feeling of familiarity is understandable.

WC: Tell me more about the importance of balancing multiple identities through these poems, especially as they pertain to Southern Black culture and religion.

VAS: It is important for me to learn more about my family history, especially as it pertains to the South. My ancestral lands are in Alabama, I attended the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and I have lived my adult life with my husband and children in the Atlanta area for twenty-five years. While most of my family live in the North, my closest friends and extended family of faith, many of whom have similar stories of migration, live right here in Atlanta. I hope my poems demonstrate my personal journey to recognize God’s hand wherever I am.

WC: How do the natural images and themes, especially in the last section, tie in with the rest of the collection?

VAS: The natural images and themes represent another facet of who I am as a human being on this earth. I wrote my first poem, “The Sound of Sunshine, and the Sound of Rain” in the fourth grade. I love to take walks and gentle hikes in nature. At times when life is stressful and hard on my soul, nature reminds me of my place in this infinite universe and how blessed by God I am to have the senses and the mind to experience it. I hope this section is as refreshing to others as each poem was for me to write.

WC: “Silence is what I know: how to be/quiet with my eyes open.” What does it mean to know silence, and what does this knowledge bring to Back to Alabama?

VAS: Sometimes silence seems awkward and uncomfortable, but silence and temporal distance is often necessary for me to process tough subjects. Instead of adding to the chaos of the world around me, my own silence allows me to breathe and be fully aware. I don’t have my head in the sand in Back to Alabama; I do my best to confront the noise and search for peace.

Back to Alabama is available now

Valerie A. Smith is a poet and creative nonfiction writer with a PhD in English from Georgia State University. She earned her masters at Kennesaw State University where she is currently a lecturer. She is a 2022 Sewanee Writers’ Conference Scholar and Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts Fellow. Her poems have appeared in Wayne Literary Review, Spectrum Literary Journal, Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, Aunt Chloe: A Journal of Artful Candor, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Oyster River Pages, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Solstice Literary Magazine, Auburn Avenue, and South 85. Above all, she values spending quality time with her family.

A black person sitting in front of a field of tulips, smiling widely. They have an afro and wear mint-colored glasses with a navy sweater and gray jeans.

Whitney Cooper holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Kentucky University, where they served as editor-in-chief of Jelly Bucket, the graduate literary journal run by the university. They also work as a reader for Atlanta Review. A clerical error was made while earning their bachelor’s degree, and they have been passionate about poetry ever since. Their poetry appears in Glassworks Magazine, Stillpoint Literary Magazine, Calliope, Right Hand Pointing, and SHARK REEF. They live in Metro Atlanta with their partner, cat, and miniature schnauzer mix.